Monthly Income + Traffic Report + Goals | May 2017 | First Month

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more info.

So, our first month of blogging is in the history books and as promised, we are going to share our monthly income report and traffic report. In fact, our site didn’t actually go live until May 19, so “first month” is really an overstatement! This is more like first our first 13 day check-in! But, there’s no time like the present to start a routine and it will really give us a baseline to compare June with!

Traffic Report

First of all, let’s start with our Traffic Report, since without traffic there really can be no income!

Website Traffic

Pageviews is something that blog owners talk a lot about. It is an indication of how many readers you have coming to your website, how many pages they visit while they are there and how many times they return. Very useful numbers to know and understand! We’re still learning!

So we had 423 page views in total, which means that from our 139 session, we have an average of 3.04 page visits per session. This is what we want! We want people to find our blog and then spend some time, moving about it, getting to know us! Our bounce rate is higher than I’d like to see it at 48.2% but for our first month, I’ll be happy with it! A bounce rate indicates the number of users who leave your website after just visiting one page. The lower the number, the better your audience engagement and website flow!

Social Media Traffic

As you can see from the image below we’re just getting started on Twitter. We’ve got a little happening, but again, not much to report. We have found some articles that we think our readers will connect with and are going to promote those more this month!

We grammed our first photo on May 22nd – with zero followers. We’ve certainly not grown our numbers like wildfire but are happy for the start we’ve made. We’ve been trialing Tailwind as a scheduler for our feed. Might try Hootsuite as well. Excited to connect more with our followers and get to you better in June!

Grace LOVES Pinterest. She was an early adopter when Pinterest first started and uses it to plan our road trips, vacations, recipes and so much more! We’ve learned a lot about starting a profitable blog from content we’ve found on Pinterest!

Grace is busy putting together some new boards for Aging and More and we think you’re going to love some of the content! Pop on by her board and give her a follow! She’s also putting together a few Group Boards with some great collaborators, so check those out too!

If you have content you’d like to contribute to any of our Group Boards, drop her an email at grace@agingandmore.com with the subject: PIN REQUEST Be sure to include your Pinterest Profile and the board you’d like to be considered for!

So here are our numbers for May.

Email List Subscribers

Gigantic ZERO! We know how important it is to build your email subscribers list, right from the start, so this is something we will be giving more attention over the next few months! We’ll be launching our FREE Resources Library this month and hope you’ll click on the link in the top menu bar to check it out when it’s ready!

Income Report

Moving on to our Income Report! This is going to be a little scary to admit!

So I’ll just out and say it. We made NOTHING! And surprisingly we’re okay with that!

We are on a journey into learning how to start a profitable blog. To say we’ve figured it out within the first month of launching our blog would be crazy!

Accomplishments

What we can check off as an accomplishment is that we have been accepted into some of our Top Picks for Affiliate Programs! As well as some Product Specific Affiliate Programs. We’re really excited to share these with you, as we are confident that you’ll love what they offer, just as much as we do!

A shout out to Michelle at Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing! Without her incredible course, we’d be nowhere! At the start of her course she had us write down some goals. One of them read: I am interested in affiliate marketing and am taking this course because… and I answered: because I know without a doubt that it CAN work but don’t know enough to make it work. If you’re interested making money as a blogger but aren’t sure where to start check our our review of Michelle’s course! How to Make Money Blogging | A Course in Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

We’re trialing FreshBooks for our accounting. Their offices are within walking distance of our home in Toronto! We’ve heard nothing but amazing things about them and are super excited to give them a try! If you are looking to get your expense tracking organized, give them a try – they have a Free Trial! And we love that they make it easy to know exactly how our business is performing. After all, that is what these income reports are all about. Having powerful data and business insights available to make decisions! It is a key to success!

Expenses

Website Domain / Hosting

Because of the type of hosting plan we’ve decided to go with, our website domain registration was only $8.99 for the whole year!

Now there are lots of month-to-month hosting plans available out there that will let you get started for just a couple of dollars a month. BlueHost and GoDaddy are very popular and excellent options! However, we’ve chosen to go with services from Dot5Hosting, in part because of positive past experiences. Mostly though, it was because they have incredible service when it comes to supporting any issues you run into with your hosting, server or website. We really have no desire to become hosting or server experts, so we’re happy to leave this in their very capable hands!

Responsive WordPress Theme

We were hesitant to purchase the #1 Best Selling Blog & Magazine WordPress Theme of the Year but we are sure glad we did! Our responsive WordPress Theme has been worth every penny! It has been amazingly easy to work with, especially as someone relatively new to WordPress and blogging! If you’re looking for an easy to use, responsive WordPress Theme, we’d suggest you check out Soledad. We’re glad we did!
Course

Fonts

With so many free fonts on the web you might wonder why we would pay for fonts! There are just some we love! We spent $34.99 USD to pick up a couple of our favourites! There are lots of places to find great fonts! Creative Market is one of our favourites! And they have an email list worth subscribing to! Get 6 FREE design elements every Monday (photo, font, templates, etc) in a Happy Monday email that we look forward to! The quality of their products and their pricing makes adding great design content a no-brainer! Check out their WordPress Templates! Some lovely options available!

Frank is husband to Grace and our coffee drinking jack-of-all-trades! He is a technology junkie and escapes with a good movie. Gazing up at the stars, sharing a cigar and conversation with God, is where you'll find him on a clear, quiet night.

Meet Grace + Frank

Join us on a journey!

We find that we learn so much from others who are on similar journeys. It is our sincere hope that you’ll share your own tips, tricks, experiences, successes and failures with us, so that we might also learn from you! Please say, "Hello!"

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“The Broken Way” by Ann Voskamp

What if the abundant life isn't about having better stories to share but about living a story that let's others live better? What if the goal isn't to experience more of the world but for more of the world to experience more?

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